"This entertaining history of Cuba
and its music begins with the collision of Spain and Africa and continues
through the era of Miguelito Valdés, Arsenio Rodríguez, Benny Moré, and Pérez
Prado. It offers a behind-the-scenes examination of music from a Cuban point
of view, unearthing surprising, provocative connections and making a case
for Cuba as fundamental to the evolution of music in the New World. Revealed
are how the music of black slaves transformed 16th-century Europe, how the claves
appeared, and how Cuban music influenced ragtime, jazz, and rhythm and
blues. Music lovers will follow this journey from Andalucía, the Congo, the
Calabar, Dahomey, and Yorubaland via Cuba to Mexico, Puerto Rico,
Saint-Domingue, New Orleans, New York, and Miami. The music is placed in a
historical context that considers the complexities of the slave trade;
Cuba's relationship to the United States; its revolutionary political
traditions; the music of Santería, Palo, Abakuá, Vodú, and much more."
-- from Amazon.com

That Cuba should have become a preferred tourist
destination of the early 21st century is not, I believe, because it’s the
largest of the Caribbean islands, nor because of the exuberance of its nature,
or its genuinely hospitable people, lethal cocktails or famous cigars, its food
or eclectic architecture. The dilemmas facing Cuba and the debates, both
domestic and international, imbued with a boldness of contemporary thinking,
have awakened in people of different cultures and all ages a romanticism imbued
with nostalgia for the known and unknown. Stereotypically, this was the musical
phenomenon of Buena Vista Social Club, which served to heighten the island’s
attraction, its human and musical mix. Few today would doubt that Cuba’s music
and dance have played a vital part, and, as a book on the subject, Cuba and
its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo is vital too.

Cuba and its Music is an ambitious project
whose repercussions in a different genre might be on a par with those of Buena
Vista. Grounded on frequent trips to the island and an extensive bibliography,
this book by Ned Sublette is a first for an English-reading public: a didactic
and accessible steer through part of Cuba’s turbulent history and its music,
whose parameters embrace cultural anthropology, sociology, politics, and
history, as well as musicology and music.

Not that long ago I met up with an old friend,
Rembert Egües, Cuban pianist and composer resident in Paris, son of Richard Egües,
the famous flute player, composer, arranger, and founder of the memorable Aragón
Orchestra. I commented I was reading a book that was like a history of Cuban
music written for non-Cuban readers. Rembert was at the time showing me some of
his compositions and, not familiar with the book, his rejoinder was that the
history of Cuban music is yet to be written. He challenged me to answer how many
knew about the work of “Peruchín,” one of the greatest Cuban pianists of
all time. What Rembert was trying to say was that justice hadn’t been done to
Pedro “Peruchín” Justiz – who, not by chance, Sublette mentions several
times in his book.

While not purporting to be the book on the
history of Cuban music, this is, at the very least, the most serious in its
approach. Ned Sublette, himself musicologist and musician, has delved deep and
unearthed the great Cuban musicians forgotten by most Cubans as well as
non-Cubans – or on the verge of being forgotten, like “Peruchín.”

The torrent of chronological detail, scores, anecdotes
and often little known, succulent gossip doesn’t detract from its being easy
to read. Not many authors achieve what Ned Sublette has in writing this book.
While his first visit to the island was not until the early 1990s, he has known
how to blend academic documentation and oral research with respect and
authenticity. To paraphrase novelist Gabriel García Márquez, it might be said
that Cuba’s musical history is not how it was lived by the musicians and their
fans but how it has been remembered and told. As Cuban musicologist Helio Orovio
confirmed to me in the gardens of the National Union of Artists and Writers in
Havana, sipping a glass of rum on the rocks: “Ned is a serious researcher.”
This, coming from Orovio, not given to dispense praise, was high recognition.

I
had three uncles, my mother Marta’s brothers, who were self-taught musicians
– only one still alive today. The elder was Ramón Sarduy, who was a master of
improvisation on the guitar and loved boleros. Then there was Miguel, who
was inseparable from his patched-up guitar and played as well as sang every kind
of music. They called him Categua. The youngest was great on the tumba
(conga drum) – long before it was allowed into the academy – and known
as Tito Tumba in our hometown Santa Clara and surrounding towns of what
was then Las Villas province.

When I was an adolescent and bent on study, Tito and
Miguel did all they could to teach me to play the tumba or sing those
1950s boleros that working class bohemians, sober or drunk, sang with
their souls. I did learn some of the really kitsch lines to come out of
phonographs of those times, like the song Y en las Tinieblas (And in the
Darkness), by Alfredo Gil, made popular in the late ‘50s by José Tejedor and
the inseparable Luis Oviedo: “…you left me in the darkness of the night…
and you left me losing my way…”

But when it came to dancing, from a young age I was
out on the dance floor at parties wherever I could. How could I forget the
famous matinee dances of the Las Villas societies for people of color of those
days? I danced to Beny More (I write it Cuban-style with one “n”). The most
memorable was back in 1951 at the dance hall in Caibarién, on a hill
overlooking the pretty coastal town. I danced to Aragón at Santa Clara’s
Bella Unión Society - my parents were members, which gave me rights as their
son. That was the club for blacks, while mulattos had their club El Gran Maceo,
named after Cuba’s famous 19th century Liberation Army General. I danced at
the societies in Quemado de Güines, Ranchuelo, Esperanza, Placetas, Remedios…

And so, after meticulously enjoying all 600 pages of Cuba
and its Music, subtitled From the First Drums to the Mambo, I
recommend this book with immense pleasure. Ned Sublette knows what he is saying
and how to say it, to the beat of the drum, ratifying the African in Cuban
music, on and off the island. I, for one, await that second volume Ned confessed
is in the making - perhaps to be subtitled “from cha-cha-cha
to timba” – or hip-hop a lo cubano, as performed by the group
Orishas.

Jon Pareles in the New York Times called it "a magnificent labor of love and advocacy. ... a remarkably thorough yet genially readable history." Publishers Weekly called it "Essential . . . a solid, supremely lush effort." And Global Rhythm
says: "Told with humor, affection and authority, this account . . . destined to become one of the definitive texts on the subject."

___________________________

Rumba
With a View, 6/8/04Your African roots are showing: Cracking the
code of Cuban music—in four easy piecesby Jorge Morales, Village Voice

"That said, Sublette's
strategy pays off in ample space. A "brief summary" of the
Spanish-Cuban-American War fills a 10-page chapter. He leaves his predecessors,
including Alejo Carpentier, in the dust. A musicologist, pianist, and theorist
who in his spare time invented magic realism, Carpentier broke new ground in Music
in Cuba (1946) by owning up to the African influence in Cuban music, even in
the whitest-sounding classical compositions. For Sublette, however, the history
of Cuba's music is inseparable from its racial politics. Rumba-crazed Americans
vacationing in Havana found that most percussion was banned there. Drums were
too black. It was the same regardless of who ran the show—Spanish
colonialists, the U.S. military, or American-backed, white-only Cuban
administrations. Not only does Sublette devote entire chapters to Africa, he
delivers the most cogent summary of Afro-Cuban spiritual traditions (the
drumming rituals, the syncretism with Catholic saints, the secret Abakuá
societies) that I've read by a layperson."

NED SUBLETTE SET out to write a memoir of Havana's music in the 90s, an
explosive era he participated in as musician and producer, an era that found
political lenience ushering Cuba's stellar, long-banned acts before reveling
U.S. audiences: Los Van Van, rumberos Los Munequitos de Matanzas, piano
wizard Chucho Valdes, Buena Vista's late life son party. A publisher
bought Sublette's pitch, and the fledgling author began recognizing that parts
of the musical picture needed explaining. Big parts.

By the end of Cuba and Its Music, Sublette has delved
from prehistory up to 1952 and tv, when mambo frenzy galvanized the
international scene. Cuba (a second volume will bring us up to date) is a
lithe, 600-page musicological/ethnographic trove, lusciously tempered with the
impact of pleasure, and remember, it's Cuban music we're dealing with...

...New Yorker music critic Alex Ross called Sublette
"by common consensus, the tour de force" of Seattle's Pop Conference
2003, in a July '03 piece Ross wrote on rock academia. In an e-mail, Ross added
that "Sublette's lecture was a performance in itself, and not in a showy
sort of way. Listening to him, you aren't locked up in one genre, one set of
attitudes—you're looking at some of the core DNA of music.

Cuba and Its Music wraps up with a suggested listening
list. Smithsonian Folkways discs get mention, culled from ethnologist Lydia
Cabrera's crucial field recordings, as do Tumbao's indispensable studio
classics. Sublette's own label, Qbadisc, does not, though from traditional rumba
of Los Munequitos de Matanzas to today's timba and NG La Banda, Qbadisc
rocks. Harry Sepulveda's Cuban Gold compilations for the label are
definitive, and wildly entertaining."

Last Dance in Havana: The Final Days of Fidel and
the Start of the New Cuban Revolution by Eugene Robinson

Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the
Mambo by Ned Sublette

Since Fidel Castro's brief fainting spell during a
speech in June 2001, Miami, Havana and Washington have been caldrons of
feverish speculation on his succession and the politics of a post-Castro
Cuba. Castro's designated successor is his 73-year-old brother Raul, who,
Miami hard-liners scoff, would not last a day in power. The British
journalist Richard Gott makes the case in Cuba: A New History that the
younger Castro, whose official roles include being first Vice President of
Cuba and its Minister of Defense, would nimbly survive the transition to
power. Among his advantages is the fact that it is his army, the
Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), that carries out much of the day-to-day
business in Cuba, even running the farmers' markets and tourism through
its company, Gaviota. Gott doesn't mention it, but the chief of Gaviota,
Luis Alberto Rodríguez, is married to Débora Castro Espín, Raul's
daughter. Earlier this year, another son-in-law was named to head the
Ministry of Tourism, giving Raul Castro's inner circle total control of
tourism, the number-one source of revenue for the island.

A coup is unlikely, as the Castro brothers have
already assiduously weeded out any suspected dissident elements from the
military, and only Raul has been entrusted with the succession plan. In
the event of a sudden illness or the death of Fidel Castro, according to
one former official, all members of the Politburo have been instructed to
report immediately to their homes, where they are to remain until
contacted by Raul Castro with further instructions. Should Raul decide to
use brute force to maintain the status quo, he is well positioned to do
so.

Gott is correct in his claim that the younger
Castro's clout does not stem solely from his military might. Contrary to
popular opinion, Raul Castro has been an advocate of freer markets and
economic reforms within the government. Once a Communist zealot, he has
leavened his philosophy with pragmatism in the past decade; but he has his
own health problems, stemming from periodic alcoholism--and possibly,
according to "Radio Bemba," Havana's efficient word-of-mouth
information system, from a bout with colon cancer.

Early in his book, Gott tells us he first visited
Havana in 1963 armed with letters of introduction from historian Hugh
Thomas, who wrote his groundbreaking 1,700-page opus on the history of
Cuba in 1971, updated in 2001. Which immediately raises the question: Do
we need another history of the same Caribbean island that garners as much
ink as all the countries in the Southern Hemisphere combined? The short
answer is no, but Gott does bring some new things to the table, including
new source materials, and he offers a more compact and arguably more
accessible history than Thomas's. His work has also benefited from the
friendly cooperation of many Cuban officials.

Unfortunately, Gott's soft spot for leftist Latin
American caudillos (most recently Hugo Chávez, the subject of his
previous book, a wide-eyed account of the Venezuelan revolution) is in
evidence by page 3, when the author encounters Che Guevara at the Soviet
Embassy in Havana. "Guevara strode in after midnight, accompanied by
a small coterie of friends, bodyguards and hangers-on, wearing his
trademark black beret, and with his shirt open to the waist. He was
unbelievably beautiful ...[and] had the unmistakable aura of a rock
star." No one denies Guevara's good looks and charisma, but he was
also responsible for some of the worst excesses of the Cuban Revolution,
including scores of summary executions. Che's brutality merits only one
sentence--much later--in the text. This fairly consistent bias marks most
of the chapters dealing with Castro and his revolution. Sometimes Gott is
spot on, but too often one cringes, as when he lauds Castro's hand-groomed
foreign minister, Felipe Perez Roque, who is as unpopular as he is
sycophantic. Perez Roque, writes Gott, is a "sure hand at foreign
affairs, sustaining Cuba's extraordinary worldwide support." What
international support could he be referring to? Cuba has endured repeated
condemnations in the United Nations, has been barred from the Organization
of American States for decades and these days has barely been on speaking
terms with Mexico, its longtime historic ally.

Gott fares considerably better with Cuba's earlier
history. He argues that the island's Indian roots and influences are more
profound than many believe. Most chroniclers--and successive Cuban
governments--have long argued that the conquistadors wiped out Cuba's
Tainos and Siboneys, thus creating a pure Afro-Cuban culture based
strictly on black slaves and the conquering Spaniards. I have always found
this fairly compelling, as Cubans are decidedly different in appearance
from Central America's mestizo population. And I was always struck by the
naming of one of Cuba's largest provinces and its capital as Matanzas--meaning
massacres, said to refer to the slaughter of Indians that occurred. Still,
Gott makes a convincing case for the survival and contributions of Indians
in Cuban life.

In short supply in Gott's book are the various
perspectives of Cuba's exiles--no small oversight, as about one-tenth of
the population has fled. Also, we do not get a clear sense of the complex
and crushing triangulation among Castro, exiles and US politics. In May,
just in time for the 2004 election season, the Bush Administration
announced its new policy on Cuba--drafted by a handpicked team of
hardliners. The new policy virtually ends all educational travel to Cuba,
slices remittances to relatives on the island and limits family visits for
exiles from one per year to one every three years. Travel is now limited
only to parents and children, with aunts, uncles and cousins no longer
considered "family"--a blow to most Cubans, who value extended
families.

Around the same time, Americans learned how their tax
dollars earmarked for the "war on terrorism" were being spent. A
Treasury Department report noted that it employed four investigators to
hunt for the funds of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein as opposed to
twenty-one to chase after Cuba embargo violators.

Among those prosecuted have been a 75-year-old
grandmother from San Diego who took a bicycling trip in Cuba, an Indiana
Christian academy teacher who delivered Bibles there and the son of
missionaries who traveled there to spread his parents' ashes at the site
of the church they founded fifty years ago. Since 1990 OFAC, the Treasury
division charged with handling sanction violations, had investigated only
ninety-three cases related to terrorism and, since 1994, had collected
$9,425 in related fines. This compared with 10,683 cases against travelers
to Cuba, for which $8 million in fines was collected. In an unguarded
interview in GQ magazine, Colin Powell's chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson,
opined on the use of sanctions against Cuba as the "dumbest policy on
the face of the earth. It's crazy."

The restrictive new policy, however, was a triumph
for Mario and Lincoln Diaz-Balart, the two exile brother Congressmen from
Miami. Gott gives us the bare-bones background of the Castro/Diaz-Balart
relationship, but not enough to understand how much this bitter family
feud has poisoned US-Cuba relations. In 1948 Fidel Castro married his best
friend Rafael Diaz-Balart'ssister, Mirta (whom he later divorced). A year
later their son was born and christened Fidel Castro Diaz-Balart, a
remarkable oxymoronic apellido (last name) uniting two warring families in
one name. The Diaz-Balarts were powerful ministers in Batista's
government--and Batista's close friends and neighbors--upon whom Castro
would soon declare war.

Rafael would have four sons, two of whom--Lincoln and
Mario--inherited their father's passion for politics. Lincoln is among
Castro's most implacable and bellicose enemies and led the crusade to keep
Elián González in the United States. During his political career,
Lincoln has called for a naval blockade of Cuba and military force to be
used against his former uncle, and even suggested on Miami television this
year that the assassination of Castro was a good idea.

About 60 percent of Cuban-Americans in the United
States arrived after the 1980 Mariel boat exodus. According to two recent
polls, one conducted by Florida International University and the South
Florida Sun-Sentinel, the other by Bendixen & Associates, members of
this group tend to view themselves primarily as economic, not political,
refugees. For them, family comes first, then issues of freedom in Cuba.
Unlike the first wave of exiles, these more recent arrivals reject any
policy of confrontation with the island that could bring harm or added
hardship to their families still in Cuba. High on their agenda is
unfettered travel to Cuba, along with the ability to send unlimited cash
to their families. True, they do not turn out to vote as strongly as
first-wave exiles, but they make up one-third of the Cuban-American vote.
But that one-third can swing a presidential election--as Bill Clinton
proved in 1996.

John Kerry, as cautious a politician as they come,
saw an opening and has ambled over to it. With his eye on that crucial
one-third slice of Cuban votes, he criticized the policy as antifamily and
encouraged more travel. If he plays his cards right--a big if--he could
peel off just enough Cuban voters to carry Florida on November 2.

But again, exile politics really do not figure much
in Gott's history. To my mind, that's a huge omission.

Eugene Robinson, the Style editor for the Washington
Post, focuses his infatuation with Cuba on its music. It's a smart choice.
Along the way, he passes on some insights about Cuba's reluctant embrace
of hip-hop in 1999 as "an authentic expression of Cuban
culture"--meaning they would no longer try to shut it down, a
calculation Robinson likens to LBJ's truce with J. Edgar Hoover:
"Better to have him inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing
in."

There are no stunning revelations here, no "big
gets" or up-close-and-personal interviews with Castro, Che or Elián.
But Robinson has a sharp, quirky take on the island, and he writes with
verve. Most of all, he brings a fan's passion to his subject and makes you
want to be there at a Bamboleo concert, even in the ghastly and depressing
barrio of Alamar, where Cuban hip-hop was born. And he leaves no question
that Los Van Van is the greatest band in history. Sounds fatuous? No
doubt--but Robinson goes a long way toward making his case. "If you
were to combine the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen and
the E Street Band," he writes, "you'd have an idea what Los Van
Van have meant to Cuba over the past thirty years."

Last Dance in Havana lacks footnotes or chapter
notes, and occasionally Robinson reaches for the dissonant metaphor, as
when he describes Castro as a dancer on the world stage. He describes
Castro's reaction to the US invasion of Iraq: "The crafty old
dancer-in-chief rose to his feet and began to move." It's a strained
trope since, as every Cuban knows, Castro does not dance (one of a number
of ways in which he is decidedly un-Cuban). Still, this book works as
memoir or travel writing--a well-wrought, breezy essay on that problematic
island in the Caribbean.

The book on Cuba that merits a place on the shelf
alongside Hugh Thomas's opus is Ned Sublette's masterwork Cuba and Its
Music. Subtitled From the First Drums to the Mambo, Sublette's
methodically researched book covers that and much more in some 672 pages.
And that's just the first volume; a second is in the works beginning where
this one ends--March 10, 1952, the day a former army sergeant named
Fulgencio Batista seized power in a coup from which Cuba has yet to
recover, even today.

Sublette, a musician, producer and founder of the
record company Qbadisc, begins his sweeping, magisterial book with an
audacious claim for a skinny, carrot-haired Texan: "This is a history
of music from a Cuban point of view." But the claim is more than
justified, and in Havana I was struck by the high regard musicians had for
the americano from Lubbock, who was clearly seen as an aplatanado cubano,
a transplanted Cuban.

"People often ask me how I got interested in
Cuban music," Sublette writes in his preface. "The short answer
is, I have good taste." And that he does. Although every musician who
ever slapped a drum seems to get credited here, Sublette saves his
enthusiasms for the divine: the achingly sublime trova singer Maria Teresa
Vera, the bravura bassist Cachao, the versatile and prolific Sindo Gary
and the celestially powered guajira singer Celina Gonzalez. And there are
plenty of tasty nuggets about the brilliant and self-destructive Benny Moré,
whose "soaring voice could sing any genre of Cuban music with any
band," and the legendary son musician Arsenio Rodriguez, the blind
grandson of a slave from the Congo who popularized the horn-driven bands
known as conjuntos in the 1930s. Rodriguez's songs blended African and
Spanish idioms, set to a rhythm that he called "canto congo." As
Sublette observes, "White Cuban composers were writing dialect songs,
but Arsenio was literally writing a history in a popular song,
perpetuating the memory of how his grandfather's generation talked."
Rodriguez left Cuba in 1951 for New York, where his star never shone as
brightly as it did in Havana.

Many other musicians would follow Rodriguez seeking
freedom, not to mention more lucrative record deals. Others stayed behind
and threw in their lot with the revolution. There were the dueling divas:
The great salsa star Celia Cruz died last year in her home in New Jersey,
while Celina Gonzalez still lives in her neighborhood of Marianao.
Exile/island comparisons have not always been kind to the former. Compare,
for example, the slickly produced pop of Miami transplants like Gloria
Estefan and Jon Secada with the aging soñeros of the Buena Vista Social
Club.

Sublette weaves his history of Cuban music with the
island's political history, from the Spanish conquest and the slave trade
to the Independence War and the rise of a scruffy, bearded guy from Biran
named Fidel Castro, who had a tin ear and a flat foot but scorching
ambition. I read a few dozen books on Cuba and exiles before writing my
own, so I don't say this lightly: If you buy only one book on Cuba in your
life--and want the history, culture and politics all in one volume--this
is the one.